Remember that one really f'd up Garfield comic?

When I was six or seven, both my parents worked, so we had a series of live-in nannies that took care of my brothers and me. It wasn’t as silver-spoon-y as it sounds. They were more like live-in babysitters—women in their early twenties and probably working their first job after leaving home. They actually felt like surrogate older sisters, really. Like part of the family.

There was one nanny who was with us for such a brief period of time that I can’t even remember her name—Chanel or Shania or something else Midwestern and perfume-y. After Chanel moved in, my mom took her to a department store and bought sheets, towels and other amenities for her room. That must have been on a Sunday.

On Monday, my brother and I came home from school to an empty house. She was gone. Disappeared.

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Back in 1989, Garfield creator Jim Davis—not particularly known for his provocative imagination—published a series of uncharacteristically troubling comics leading up to Halloween.

In the first comic, the intolerant, Monday-hating cat wakes up cold and shivering. Right away, we know something’s not right, because there’s black shading around Garfield. Garfield is not a comic that uses shadows, and here Davis uses it to alienating effect. In the last panel, Garfield says, “This doesn’t feel like home.” He wanders off to explore. There is no punch line.

The next comic begins with a canted angle that would be better suited for a German Expressionist film. Garfield’s owner Jon and dog/nemesis Odie are missing. Garfield stares at the audience and thinks, “I’m alone” (the lack of punctuation heightens the creepiness). In a box underneath his thought bubble, omniscient narration reads, “You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield.”

In the ensuing comic strips, Garfield discovers that his house appears to have been condemned for many years. Everyone is gone. At one point, he actually hallucinates a fake family. Fake Jon holds out bowl of food and disappears when Garfield reaches out for it. Panel after panel: desolation. And before he slips off the edge of sanity (conveyed by a monstrous illustration of Garfield’s bloodshot, spiraling, sweaty eye), Garfield wakes up.

Jim Davis has never been a savvy storyteller. In fact, it’s well documented that he created Garfield solely with marketability in mind—a far cry from mind-enriching Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) or even Charles Schulz (Peanuts).

The infamous series has remained in people’s minds nonetheless. Search the internet and there are several theories regarding the what/why/how of this particular series of Garfield strips—the popular one being that Garfield is actually still slowly starving to death in an empty house, and that all the comics that followed are just delusions caused by hunger.

(Let me tell you, reading Garfield under the notion that he’s been hallucinating for nearly 30 years brings a whole new joy to the comic.)

According to Boing Boing, Davis has stated that he simply wanted to create something “legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary.” Being alone or dying alone was what scared him the most.

It was that comic—nestled sinisterly in one of the collected volumes I used to carry around in my backpack—that haunted me on the day when my brother and I came home to an empty house. Our house had become alien and unrecognizable without the presence of adults. The shading seemed different. Had there always been those shadows? It wasn’t too far of a reach to imagine myself as Garfield, stuck in a boarded-up house, forever waiting for his family.

And this is why I think Garfield deserves its places at the table. Despite its laziness, commercialism and anti-intellectualism, there’s an underlying existential understanding, especially for an anxious mind. It’s an understanding I couldn’t articulate when I was seven, but knew there was a fundamental connection; the idea that Garfield had been in the exact same predicament was comforting. Even if Jim Davis’ orange cat is remembered as a cynical cash-grab, at least this series of comics proved he was able to make adult fear digestible for kids, and a kid fear legitimate for adults.

In Garfield, there’s only a thin veneer that hides the awkwardness and dread of life (popular blog Garfield Minus Garfield also illustrates this point). We keep afloat via our routines—work, internet, lasagna, kicking Odie, etc.—but once those disappear we’re liable to fall into pit of anxiety and loneliness, and nowhere is more routine than the world of Garfield. It’s a comic that knows what it feels like to manage anxiety by hiding it under the routines of home life, the workplace and social interactions.

When Chanel or Shania abandoned her post, she stripped the sheets of her bed and took everything that my mom had just bought her. It could’ve been a con job, but more likely she was got cold feet at the idea of watching three young boys and bailed, because the thread-count on those sheets couldn’t have been that high.

My brother and I were alone for only an hour or two before our parents came home, but an impressionable brain has the tendency to make the worst of things.